HOUND

Chapter 2: Standing. In which Hound stands and walks.

The creatures, as one, had stopped their assault and were retreating as fast as they had advanced.

The way they moved sickened me.

Not just their multi-limbed click-clicking along the ground, but with the senseless, horde mentality. No empathy, no support or thought for even their own care, they just turned and moved.

You could barely call it fleeing, it was more just they were moving in the opposite direction now.

I felt bile rise.

I could see the defenders on the ramparts cheering and waving, I could see the wall gunners wiping sweat from their foreheads and massaging bruised shoulders. This wasn’t right though, this wasn’t like the last time.

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“Harald?” I voxed

“Solid copy Hound, are we seeing the same thing?” the old man breathed

“Harald, something’s wrong here but I need you to load me; Hound’s dry and the reactors spooling back up.

I fell over the words, trying to get them out before the impending doom came for us all

“Woah now, give me a moment here fella. We just felled like…”

“Shut up and load me old man!” I almost screamed it.

Thone, how could he be so slow? Couldn’t he see what was coming?

“They didn’t just turn like that before” I howled, impatient and frustrated, “they didn’t stop coming until there wasn’t any more of them left. This is new”

“Alright alright” the old man sighed. I could feel him rolling his eyes at me. “I’ll see if young Pembroke can come to you with a fres-…”

He never finished the sentence and young Pembroke never came to load me because something huge had arced over the stockade and hammered into the final redoubt like a meteor.

Fuck, it must have been 30 feet long.

It was longer than Hound was tall.

It took out a huge chunk of inner wall, one of the wall guns and just kept going into the buildings behind. It chewed up wall and floor and flesh before coming to a stop, a huge, grotesque shape just slapped incongruously into the middle of my home. It looked like a claw, no a talon. It felt like some huge bolt, fired by an enormous crossbow. The size of it staggered me, and I spent my days walking around in 15 feet of composite metal war machine.

Then I heard it. A huge, insect roar that made the ground shake. It actually made Hound’s frame shake.

I turned around, heading back for one of the holes in the outer stockade. As I did I reactivated the augur pings and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The augur couldn’t make sense of what it was reading and just output an incessant high pitched whine. Whatever was out there, it was big.

When I got Hound’s head around the break in the stockade, I finally saw what had thrown the talon.

Fuck, it was massive. Shit. Shit. I actually panicked. For the first time since I had set foot in Hound, I felt genuine fear.

The thing was enormous. It barely even resembled the lesser kin I had just waded through. It must have stood 100 feet tall, from the base of one of its six feet to the top of its grossly elongated head. It had enormous, distended jaws that could have swallowed Hound’s cockpit whole. It had fucking mandibles so big I could see them even from the two miles or so distance.

What was worst though was its torso and arms. The smaller creatures were like arachnids or insects, bladed legs meeting a thorax that ended in what passed for eyes and a mouth. This thing had a fucking torso like a man. Almost exactly like a man, right down to the massive abdominals and enormous shoulders, each the size of someone’s house.

Its six insect legs came up to meet a wide, rounded thorax, with massive spikes growing from it and, at what was obviously the front, an incongruous human torso with the vile head mounted on the shoulders and two arms so long they brushed the floor. As the shock of what I was seeing washed over me, the long-range augurs began feeding more and more data directly into my mind via the haptic implants. I wish they hadn’t. The spikes on its back were the equals of the one that had just crushed into my home.

I realised with dawning horror that this huge thing had thrown it almost two miles in a perfect, parabolic arc. As I watched in terror, my mouth agape, the thing reached behind it and plucked free another of the huge talons.

Holy fuck, it was going to throw another.

It was going to throw another of those giant things and then it really would be game over.

I froze.

Paralysed with fear and overwhelming hopelessness. Hound didn’t freeze.

Hound was a machine.

Hound wasn’t made for fear or doubt or second guessing.

Hound was made to kill and keep on killing.

Hound started into a loping run , jolting me from my state. It took a second for me to register what was going on but, when I did, I felt such a rush of warmth and gratitude to the ancient war engine.

We were a team, Hound and I. If Hound wasn’t afraid and wanted to fight, so did I.

I let Hound run while I made myself useful decoupling useless ancillary systems and shunting all to the reactor.

The chain gun was just deadweight now, so I decoupled that too and let it fall behind where it sunk several inches into the soft earth, just leaving the long interface spike at the end of the limb.

Long range augurs? Fuck em.

Cabin lights? Not needed.

I shut down everything I could and watched the reactor output rise to 68%. Shit, better than nothing.

As I refocused and brough my mind into Hound’s, I realised that the giant creature had raised the next talon over its head, ready to crash into the stockade with a grim finality.

I couldn’t tell if what happened next was my idea, or if it was Hound’s. We moved as one, popping flares out of the shoulder launchers and then moving hard to our left.

It worked. I saw the giant thing turn its abomination of a head to follow the new light and, without any sign of hesitation, it threw the talon.

Hound reacted first, driving right and ducking low so the talon passed by us, flipping end over end and taking out a copse of trees behind me somewhere before coming to rest in a deep furrow.

I was closer now. I was closing on the thing and I was pissed. I could feel Hound’s deep, endless rage bleeding into my psyche. The adepts had spent literal years teaching me how to resist the engine’s spirt and, in a matter of seconds, I just forgot all of it and let Hound live through me, and I though him.

Although I was angry, I wasn’t stupid. As Hound closed the distance to the enormous monstrosity, now reaching to pluck another of the talons from its back, I began desperately engaging the disruptor cannon’s second position.

I felt the coils light, then shift back along the arm. I felt the barrel fall away, as a long, gently curved blade slid from it’s sheath in the arm. Finally I felt contact as the coils lit the blade, engulfing it in a snapping corona as the disruptor field came online. Hound felt it too and let loose another blaring cry through the war horns as we passed the edge of Cossack’s crater.

I had expected the thing to throw another talon as we closed but instead it brought the plucked shard to its front and charged. It moved quicker than anything that size had any right to move, swinging the talon with one arm like a huge club. Hound, with his hundreds of years of stored battle data, with his cogitators whirring away in the floor, stopped abruptly and skidded while ducking low and bringing the cabin under the talon.

The thing was so fucking big the wash it made through the air almost knocked us over but gyros and inertial dampeners kept us upright and moving. We were among it’s huge legs now, like being in a forest full of bone white trees. As we passed the first leg I brought out my arm while Hound spun, and together we brought the disruptor blade clean though the leg, slicing exoskeleton and flesh beneath.

I didn’t stop to assess the damage, we were moving on to the next leg with its huge foot in mid-step. As we got closer the oddest thing happened. The huge thing just stopped moving and flicked its leg, like it was swatting a fly.

The blow caught me on the side of the cabin and, for the second time that day, Hound went flying.

I felt white hot malice split down the side of my face but, just before I screamed aloud, Hound’s boundless rage came up and squashed all sensation.

We stuck the interface spike out as we flew and it dug into the ground, spinning us around in a semicircle as we came to a stop facing the creature, battered but upright. Hound didn’t pause. He screamed, long and loud as leg servos whined in protest as Hound powered into another loping sprint.

I was gone by then, laughing and screaming and lost inside the war engine.

All I wanted to do was hurt this fucking thing. I knew it would kill me, kill us, but before it did, I wanted it to know pain and suffering like never before.

Had I any faculties left, and had I not switched off the comms array while Hound and I were running at the giant insect thing, I would have heard a woman’s voice, cool and collected in my mind;

“Hound, I am fox three and danger close. Mind your head.”

The huge thing had its talon in a two-handed, overhead grip, preparing to bring it down on Hound and I and flatten this tiny annoyance once and for all when one of its elbows exploded in a crack of detonating munitions.

The creature screamed in pain, this vile tickling sound that made my nose bleed and popped one of Hound’s valves. It spun around, its arm hanging on by a bloody thread, searching for the new threat. Hound and I were still moving as one, dodging the falling talon, weaving through limbs before coming to a hindleg and digging the interface spike in as high up as Hound’s arm would reach.

With a scream of tortured metal and protesting servos, we dragged ourselves up, plunging the disruptor blade into the limb by the knee for purchase before moving the spike up for another climb. The huge thing screamed again and tried to twist its torso and remaining good arm to inspect the pain in its limb but, as it turned, something hot hit in full in the chest, scorching flesh and eliciting another insect scream.

I felt, rather than saw, the heat bloom on the nearfield augurs I had left on and a tiny bit of my useless mammal brain vaguely recognised the pattern. It didn’t matter though as, with a final mighty effort we pulled ourselves onto that huge, bloated thorax.

As Hound stood and prepared to jump I saw, what had saved us from being crushed by the talon earlier. Stood alone, but proud, banners fluttering in plasma backwash, was Castell.

Where Hound was quick and nimble, Castell was a rock. Build for attrition and payload delivery, Castell was both tall and wide. A slab of bonded metal, covered in weapons cradles, the engine must have made its way up from patrol in the Marches and assumed a firing position while I was hacking away at the huge thing.

I could feel Castell getting ready for another volley but, by now, I was committed. Just before Hound jumped, I opened a local vox channel and screamed;

“MINE”

Hound leaped and landed with his legs straddling the creature’s shoulders and, together, we manically hacked and pounded at that long head with both spike and blade.

Rage. Hate. Kill.

It was all I could do to bring the blade down over and over until the fucking thing’s thick skull shattered and then we were tearing through brain matter. I could feel my human eyes wide open in the cockpit. I could feel blood in my mouth.

I couldn’t remember biting my tongue but who cares, the thing was going to die.

Several dozen hacks later, and with a spastic twitch and violent convulsions convulsion, it died.